The chain-link fence across Land Park Drive from the zoo entrance has been there since 2022. Weeds have worked through the old asphalt where a pony-ride operation once ran birthday parties and school field trips. Anyone who's walked past it in the last four years has probably stopped noticing it at all. That fenced, forgotten strip of pavement is now the centerpiece of the biggest change to hit William Land Park in decades.
In early September, the Sacramento City Council approved an agreement letting the Sacramento Zoological Society pursue the purchase of two adjacent parcels, the first time the zoo has grown its footprint in nearly 60 years. One of those parcels is the old pony-ride lot. The other sits just north of the current zoo boundary, next to a memorial fountain and statue most park visitors walk past without a second look. Together, they'd take the zoo from 14.3 acres to somewhere around 20, an increase of roughly 40 percent.
If you live near the park, you've probably already heard some version of this story, animals need more room, the zoo is finally getting it. What's easy to miss in that framing is where the new acreage is actually coming from. This isn't the zoo carving into a lawn people picnic on or a trail people walk their dogs on every morning. Most of the growth is happening on ground that's already been off-limits to the public for years. The park you use today barely changes. What changes is a corner most residents had already stopped counting as part of their park.
Two Parcels, One That Nobody Missed
The larger of the two parcels, about 4.4 acres, is the former pony-ride site directly across Land Park Drive from the zoo's main gate. It closed in 2022 and has sat fenced ever since. When the city council held public comment on the broader expansion plan back in April, speaker after speaker raised concerns about traffic, parking, and the historic character of the park. Almost nobody mentioned the pony-ride lot. Longtime Land Park resident Luree Stetson explained why after the meeting: that ground had already been taken out of public use, so there wasn't much left to defend.
The smaller parcel, roughly 1.4 acres, is a different story. It sits along the zoo's northern edge and includes a memorial fountain and statue dedicated to Charles Swanston, an early Sacramento resident. That one drew real pushback. Speakers at that same meeting called it a rare open vista inside the park and argued it shouldn't be sacrificed for exhibit space. By August, the Zoological Society had revised its plan, moving the fountain and statue out of the proposed footprint even though the surrounding acre stayed in the deal. The zoo gets more land near its northern boundary. The fountain and the view around it stay put.
That's the shape of the compromise: the zoo expanded onto land the public had already lost, and gave ground on the piece the public still used.
What the Zoo Says It Actually Needs
The zoo has occupied its current 14.3-acre site in Land Park since 1927, and by most measures it's one of the smaller accredited zoos operating in the country today. Elizabeth Stallard, who chairs the Zoological Society's board of trustees, has framed the expansion as a matter of animal welfare and accreditation standards rather than visitor numbers. The Society's presentations to city commissions this summer echoed that point, describing the additional acreage as room for larger habitats and back-of-house operations, not new attractions designed to pull in bigger crowds.
Part of the plan involves relocating the zoo's education programs, which host something like 50,000 student visits a year, to a new campus across Land Park Drive rather than expanding them where they currently sit. That frees up space inside the existing footprint for habitat improvements without adding a second draw for outside visitors. City staff who briefed the Parson Community Enrichment Commission in July said as much directly: the goal is to shift existing programming, not stack a new one on top of it.
The Timeline That Won't Match Your Weekend Walks
For a project this size, the pace has been fast by planning standards and still slow by everyone else's. The council approved a nonbinding memorandum of understanding in April to study the concept. By August, the Preservation Commission had reviewed a revised design that pulled the Swanston fountain out of the footprint. In early September, the council approved the amendment letting the Society pursue the actual land purchase, with a required environmental review as the last procedural step before anything closes.
City staff have told commissioners to expect 12 to 36 months of environmental review and phased design work once the process moves forward, structured so the zoo keeps operating through construction. Translated for a resident's calendar: the fence around the pony-ride lot probably won't come down this year, and the zoo you visit next spring will look the same as the one you visited last spring. The zoo has said it doesn't expect a material shift in day-to-day attendance from the expansion itself, though new habitats or animal births could bring the occasional busy weekend, the same kind of bump the zoo already sees now.
Here's what the acreage looks like laid out side by side:
| Parcel | Size | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Current zoo footprint | 14.3 acres | Occupied since 1927 |
| Former pony-ride lot (across Land Park Drive) | ~4.4 acres | Closed to the public since 2022 |
| Parcel north of the zoo (Swanston memorial area) | ~1.4 acres | Fountain and statue excluded from the footprint |
| Projected total | ~19.9–20.1 acres | Pending environmental review |
Even at the high end of that range, the zoo would still occupy roughly a fifth of William Land Park's total acreage. The park itself covers more than 100 acres, and nothing in the current proposal touches the golf course, Fairytale Town, or Funderland. The expansion is real, but it's contained to two parcels most people had already mentally filed under "not part of the park."
The Part That's Still Unresolved
Traffic and parking are the pieces nobody has fully answered yet. Kristina Rogers, who leads the Land Park neighborhood association, told the council in April that the park "was not designed for the amount of traffic that we get now," and pressed for a clear timeline before any construction starts. She's since suggested ideas like shuttle service and habitat features that tie the zoo more directly to the park's own ecosystem, including a possible bat sanctuary, as ways the expansion could give something back to the neighborhood rather than just take from it.
Councilmember Rick Jennings, whose district includes the zoo, told residents in April that working together through September could produce a plan that addressed their concerns. The vote that finally came in September did close to what he described: an approval that passed with no recorded votes against, which Jennings called a compromise built to preserve both the park and the zoo, with continued neighborhood coordination written into the next phase rather than left to chance.
What that means in practice is that the fights over this project aren't over. They've just moved from "should the zoo expand" to "how do you handle 20 more acres of traffic and construction inside a hundred-year-old park." That's a more specific, more answerable question, and it's the one the environmental review process is built to work through over the next few years.
What This Actually Changes for Anyone Walking the Park This Fall
Nothing yet. The fence stays up. The fountain stays where it is. The zoo you can walk into this weekend is the same size it was last month. What's changed is that a piece of land most residents had quietly written off, the old pony-ride lot, now has a defined future, and a piece of land they specifically fought to protect, the Swanston memorial, came out of the plan largely intact. The next visible sign of change probably won't be a groundbreaking. It'll be survey stakes near that fence line, sometime after the environmental review clears.
For anyone who uses the park regularly, the useful timing to keep in mind is that the fence line and the fountain both stay as they are until the environmental review wraps up.
Watching how a hundred-year-old park absorbs a change like this, acre by acre, is part of what it means to actually know Land Park rather than just sell it. Caviard Realty Associates will keep tracking the zoo expansion as the environmental review and design work move forward. Reach out if you want the next update before it hits the neighborhood group chat.
